Older Voices: Supporting community radio production in later life using digital technologies

How can older adults make meaningful use of digital technologies and community media? We are in an ongoing collaboration the Elders Council of Newcastle and their Older Voices project, a community radio show produced by and for older adults in the North East of England and support their civic participation interests using digital technologies.

The Older Voices radio team faced different challenges: audience engagement, content persistence and process sustainability, which were identified together as part of a co-creation process. To address these challenges, we supported the group’s audience engagement by using Facebook Live, adding a phone-in option to the Older Voices show and developing a non-intrusive and tailored digital production tool to edit and upload broadcasts, the “Radio Grabber”.

This work led onto the formation of the Later Life Audio Radio Network (LLARN) a network promoting the representation of older adults in audio and radio broadcasting and advocating for a diverse narrative on ageing.

Radio Grabber

The “Radio Grabber”, as named by the Older Voices team, is a digital tool which supports the group in editing and uploading of their content, thus creating and archive of the Older Voices content on YouTube.

This allows audience engagement to be tracked (such as clicks on particular topics), and ensures that the content can be re-listened to and accessed by a wider audience

Using the software, the Older Voices team uploaded their running order and recorded radio show to the Radio Grabber. In the audio editor, each section was tagged reflecting the topic of the running schedule, thus making it easier to find certain segments. The edited segments were then uploaded to the Elders Council’s YouTube to be listened to.

Having used the Radio Grabber for nearly a year now, we found that Older Voices valued the use of digital technology as a means to support their audience engagement and facilitate the archiving of their material.

Visit the Older Voices Facebook page to find out more